David Braswell
Forum Replies Created
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The biggest thing you should do is plant yourself in front of both of these editors before hanging your future dreams, edits, and career on one. Avid offers FreeDV as an introduction to the “Avid interface”. And FCP is becoming ubiquitous as Coke, so you should (hopefully) be able to find an editor using it. You may find giving up some intuitiveness worthwhile to gain stability, flexibility, robustness, and Media Management.
Before going the Apple route, be aware that you’ll need to transcode your existing footage into an FCP friendly format. Also, are you prepared to purchase Mac versions of your graphics creation software? Or will you wear your network out shuffling graphics between computers.
You should also consider the rest of your post-production workflow. Do you finish with your editor or will you be transferring and finishing elsewhere. I can’t speak for FCP, but Avid’s offline/online workflow is well known and very mature.
If the decision is big as you portray it, it deserves more hands-on input than forum crawling and reading the opinions of other well meaning editors.
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On my Adrenaline… find the “hamburger” menu at bottom left of bin. Click it and select “Headings”. Hi lite “Comments”.
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The answer depends on what package you’re using and how you’re creating the graphics. If you’re using a recent version of Photoshop that’s “rectangular pixel” aware, 720×486 is fine for graphics. You need to import them using the “601/709/nonsquare” setting. If you’re using old-school software that only outputs square pixel files, work with a 720×540 graphic size. Then import using the “maintain/resize” option.
The Avid is pretty agnostic when it comes to file formats. I usually work with PSD and PNG files. It will accept a slew of others however.
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By decomposing your final sequence, you create a folder that contains only the clips that were used. It’s a way to limit the amount of footage you’re archiving. Of course, if you need all the raw media this won’t work.
You won’t lose any quality through consolidation as it simply copies the media to a new location. Be aware that alpha channel graphics won’t consolidate (in my experience), and will stop the process with an error about negative indexes. That’s another reason it might be good to decompose your sequence before consolidating; you can then choose only footage.
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It sounds like you can encode as PAL… but once you’ve created the DVD, you’ll need PAL equipment to check playback and functionality. That’s my understanding. You’ll also need to redesign your graphics for the PAL video frame (800 something or other by 576). Playing the PAL video back on your computer is not a problem… just the real world check of playback from DVD player. My dub/conversion house also stated that many player in Europe will play back NTSC and PAL no problem. But the last NTSC DVD sent overseas didn’t work.
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Unless you definitely have a way to view your finished product and assure it works, I would let a dub house do it. I’ve recently had to do this for DVD. They create PAL MPEGs to use. But like I mentioned, they have a way to view final file.
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What’s wrong with decomposing your final sequence and consolidating across multiple DVDs if necessary?
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That’s what I mean too :-> Chaz, in the hidden triangle dropdown of the color scopes(histogram and parade), you can choose Y, YC, and a vectorscope. Additionally, depending on your version of Xpress, there is a broadcast legalizer plugin. Check for all this in the help file. Of course, there is no substitute for a good hardware scope. But, this is better than nothing.
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DV25 411 = DV25, yes, they are the same.
Toolset–> Color Correction to bring up your scopes.
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From 5.7, 5.7.2 is a $50 upgrade. It adds scrolling timeline and some other things. Visit this page for more info.